‘For most of us the true value of the things we find is human. These are the relics not of famous kings and saints but of ordinary people.’ Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

My fingers are still cracked from the cold of a clear Monday in the Kent countryside. Wrapped up in numerous layers, my friend James and I were out with thermos flasks, shovels and metal detectors to explore the past hidden beneath the frozen turf.

Like all the best hobbies, detecting rests on a central streak of futility. For every interesting artefact you might find, there are a score of beeps that turn out to represent modern litter or a nugget of anonymous metal decayed beyond all recognition. Inevitably, you only find that out by digging a hole to reach your latest disappointment.

That’s part of the fun. Each bit of rubbish that we search for and sweat to retrieve is an instant joke, or forgotten immediately as hope washes in while you backfill the divot dug to uncover it. Being out in a field somewhere in all weathers, powered by some sarnies and an endless optimism is an experience in itself – it teaches you patience and in a hectic world it’s refreshing to clear your mind of all but the occasional bleeps. The repeated rigmarole of digging a hole, scrabbling at the bottom, studying your find, then carefully refilling the hole and replacing the turf starts as a muddy form of scratch card and soon becomes a luck mantra in its own right.

As with so many fringe pursuits, metal detecting takes place mostly in a private world. Barring the occasional headlines of a big or rare find, it exists in empty fields and crowded internet forums, where people share their finds, identify mystery objects posted by others or offer tips on different kit and favoured tactics. It has its own slang (shotties for the rusted caps of shotgun cartridges, the detectorist’s curse; hammies for the sought-after medieval hammered coins; grots for coinage rotten beyond identification), and its own community. Partners swiftly resign themselves to the fact that a corner of their house will likely play host to a supposedly interesting collection of odds and ends that you can never display to any guest who isn’t very keen on 17th-century lead trading tokens.

Inevitably, we fall victim to being misunderstood. Headlines reporting “treasure hunters” finding this or that miss the mark – most detectorists see themselves as amateur archaeologists adding to the knowledge of the nation, not Del Boys on a get-rich-quick scheme. If you went out expecting to come home with a haul of precious metal each day, you’d swiftly give up.

The misunderstanding isn’t helped by the persistence of the inevitable minority of sinful detectorists – who enjoy the perhaps over-dramatic nickname of nighthawks. Normally operating under cover of darkness, hence the name, they dig on people’s land without permission, trash registered archaeological sites and ignore the treasure laws for profit. They are rare but their impact is sufficient to make a sizeable number of landowners and professional archaeologists unduly suspicious of our hobby. As a result, the law-abiding lose out.

For most of us, though, the true value of the things we find is human, not monetary. These are the relics not of famous kings and saints but of ordinary people. My finds tray (which lives discreetly on top of a bookcase, after some domestic negotiations) contains the belongings of individuals lost to history: the spur of a late medieval horseman, the small change of a Georgian farm labourer, the coin weights of a Stuart market trader. None of those original owners have a museum exhibition to their name, or even a name at all in the modern day. But the artefacts they dropped, the loss of which they no doubt cursed, bring me a jolt of excitement each time one is washed of the soil that concealed it for centuries. A glance at the website of the Portable Antiquities Scheme, where detectorists voluntarily register their day-to-day finds, shows that these glorious mundanities are the vast bulk of what we turn up.

Of course, that’s not to say it wouldn’t be great to find a hoard. Paul Coleman, who unearthed those thousands of 10th and 11th-century coins, made the find of a lifetime. As his find undoubtedly falls under the Treasure Act, the coins will be valued by the British Museum and bought from him by the nation – he deserves congratulations, thanks for his addition to our knowledge of the Anglo-Saxons and the sizeable bounty that will no doubt come his way.

But his experience is a rarity. For the bulk of his fellow detectorists, whom I’m sure he will rejoin in the fields when the itch starts again soon, such a find remains a fantasy. The day-to-day reality remains enough to drive us out into the fields, headphones on, spade slung behind us, flogging back and forth in search of just a tiny glimmer of past centuries.

The cold-seared fingers with which I tap out this article are a minor irritation but I’m willing to overlook them. Because after a day of being battered by the December wind, and cutting through barely thawed turf, I finally brought a small, muddy nugget up from the ground. A quick clean revealed a glimmer of gold and a tiny, recognisable shape: he was missing his legs and worn by the years, but in my hand was a lead angel, cast and gilded likely in the medieval era. His right hand is raised, and he has what looks like a sword belt slung around his waist. And he makes it all worthwhile.